Climate change negotiators from around the world – now meeting at the COP22 conference in Marrakech, Morocco – continue steadfastly with the task of putting meaning and action into the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement to bring down global greenhouse gas emissions.

Scenario 1: Walk out with the US

If the Trump administration decides to withdraw from the Paris Agreement then other major economies which are parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will have justification to do the same. This is de facto what happened with the 1997 Kyoto Protocol once it became clear that the U.S. would not ratify and was not serious about its implementation.

Whether the walkout is a formal withdrawal from the agreement or an informal abdication from its responsibilities, the Paris Agreement would be effectively doomed as signatories fail to meet pledges to reduce country emissions made in Paris. The implication of such a scenario is that the UNFCCC negotiation process could just wither away and critical agreed-upon temperature goals would slip further out of reach.

Such a rationale and the anger that would be triggered by a U.S. walk-out of the Paris Agreement, particularly amongst the European Union (EU) and China, could induce the parties that remain serious about the agreement to adopt a retaliatory posture. While it would be unprecedented, countries could decide that a U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement should have real consequences for U.S. involvement and participation in the U.N. climate change process.

If they were to do so, they would be taking a cue straight out of Donald Trump’s book “The Art of the Deal” and its key dictums of “fighting back very hard” and “using every leverage.” As Donald Trump puts it in his book: “The worst thing you can possibly do [is to] seem desperate… That makes the other guy smell blood, and then you’re dead.”

There has already been at least one suggestion that a U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement should be met with not just forcing the U.S. out of all global climate arrangements but imposing “economic sanctions in the face of this [Trump’s] treaty-shredding lawlessness.”

Reasoning along such lines could compel the other countries to simply wait out any tantrums of the Trump administration. Essentially, this would mean ignoring U.S. theatrics in the hope that time will bring either sanity or a different president to the White House who would steer the U.S. back into support of the Paris provisions.

Other major powers, especially China, may also view this as an opportunity to assume international political and environmental leadership without fully igniting the wrath of a Trump White House by actively pushing the U.S. aside. Then the result could be a de facto sidelining of the United States as an essential player in global climate change politics, at least for a while.

Scenario 4: Engage the US

Unseemly as Donald Trump may seem to many countries on many levels, it is not easy – maybe not even possible – to ignore or sideline the world’s largest economy and still the only real superpower on the planet. On all sorts of international issues the world will have to learn to engage President Trump. This could also be the case for climate change.

Attendees at COP22 lament the victory of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and call on civil society to take greater action on climate change.Photo by IISD/ENB | Liz Rubin

During the George W. Bush administration, other major actors kept negotiating with the United States even after its unequivocal rejection of the Kyoto Protocol. Back then other countries believed that the importance of the United States as both a leading political and economic power and greenhouse gas emitter was so great it was better to keep it inside the UNFCCC process.

Such engagement with the Trump administration can take place both through multilateral channels and in bilateral talks, mainly with China and the European Union. The question would be whether President Trump would be willing to remain engaged, and on what terms.